Histoires d'historiennes (review)

This volume of twenty essays, the second in the series 'L'Ecole du genre', tackles a wide chronological scope. It meets head-on the series' commitments to genre studies and to the longue durée. Six articles focus on the 'long' nineteenth century, exemplified by Annie Bruter's discussion of history taught in primary schools between 1793 and 1914. On the other hand, it is hard to accept as part of 'le long XIXe siècle' Delphine Naudier's lively account of the work of the historical novelist Jeanne Bourin (1922–2003). Similarly, one detects some editorial convenience in the set of five case studies headed 'Un "Ancien Régime"?' The gap of over two hundred years between the outputs of Christine de Pizan and Madame de Villedieu is a yawning chasm, which the welcome translation into French of Natalie Zemon Davis's seminal article of 1980 ('Gender and genre: women as historical writers, 1400–1820') might logically have filled, had the volume editors not chosen to set it apart 'En guise d'introduction'. Many of Zemon-Davis's injunctions, so new a quarter of a century ago, have clearly born fruit. Marie-Emmanuelle Plagnol's analysis of Madame de Genlis's memoirs proves that just because women often write different types of history from men – e.g. family or personal history – their contribution is no less deserving of serious study. Similarly, Zemon Davis's account of women historians' consciousness of their role as women writing history illuminates Carla Hesse's account of Louise de Keralio-Robert's intellectual and political approach to history in the early years of the Revolution. Claude Ghiati's list of 66 women historians at the turn of the 19th/20th centuries invites us to return to one of the questions raised by Nicole Pellegrin in her opening essay: why do the works of women historians get lost? Perhaps one answer is indirectly furnished by Cécile Dauphin's analysis of publications between 1966–07 by the Centre de Recherches Historiques: while the overall volume of contributions by women has increased since the 1980s, major editorial projects (dictionaries, large-scale histories) are more often run by men. Martine Sonnet's quantitative analysis of the work of women historians in the late 20th century also suggests that we need to look closely at the relationship between gender and publishing opportunities. In certain traditional areas, notably school education, women's influence has traditionally been greater, as Isabelle Havlange shows in her study of Mélanie de Boileau's role as 'maîtresse d'histoire' under the Second Empire. It would be easy to think of areas of potential enquiry not represented in this volume, such as the way in which women historians use the French language. The contributors to this volume – mainly women themselves – all use the inflected form 'auteure', but Brigitte Keriven demonstrates that authors of obituaries on women historians have been less easy about the style to adopt, resorting frequently to passive 'feminine' stereotypes in their praise – these are unlikely to be applied to the 'historiennes' at work in the present volume.